I have worked as an Android developer for 2 years at a startup and the worst thing is the micro-managing part. Companies take so many tests for developers and hire project managers or product managers who don't know shit about tech or how anything works. All they know is to ask "When will it be done?" and don't care about the complexity of the implementation or the time taken to do something the right way , an optimised solution. Another issue is releasing app/software without thorough testing and then blaming the developers for any bugs and crashes. Third and very important aspect is the "Why?". Nobody cares to explain why we are doing things certain way, why are we changing the designs, why are we moving the button, etc. Developers are not robots whom you can give any task and expect them to complete it in a ziffy. Developers want to understand the reason behind the changes, the results of these changes so that they know they are doing something worth the time and effort.
Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
161–170 of 396 posts
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#162Working for a company building heavy hardware, I see the following happen time and time again: * Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing. Result: Every time the new organization has settled somewhat and people know who to interact with to make things flow smoothly, everything is upended and back to square one. * Trying to make our products buzzword compliant without understanding the consequences - we've…
> a man "a person"?
>> a man
> "a person"?
-Definitely a person; however, the gender balance in my immediate surroundings is -ahem- slightly skewed and I all too easily fall into the trap of calling any person a man.
(Judging from the time clock (whose logs are openly available on the intranet, presumably through oversight rather than by design), there are currently 217 people working in the hall I currently sit in. Of those, one appear to be female.)
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#163* Killing things that are low profit margins, under some misguided Pareto Principle approach. Sometimes these things are loss leaders designed to pull customers for other products. * Spending too much on marketing/sales before people want the product. They usually just end up burning their brand if the product is too low quality. * Too much focus on building multiple small features rather than focusing on the value p…
> Importing tech talent, rather than promoting. is often at odds with both the point above and below it. When a company is in rapid growth, there may be a point where the talent they relied on is not quite ready for the promotion they are hiring in for. Without expanding that search outside, you may become stale in the organization, and not provide the right mentorship to ensure that those interested in getting promo…
Except that the usual thing is to pay the new guy more and believe his story that the tech he used at the last gig, that he is now an expert in, is better than how you did it. Now management makes the new expert the boss. Next thing the old guy discovers the new guy was just in the right place at the right time in the last place and is useless, but, because he is the new boss you have to do everything again.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#164Outsourcing (and loosing the knowledge), almost always ends up more expensive in the end, compared to in house teams...
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#165i don't think they make too many mistakes. from their perspective its about minimizing cost and maximising earnings and i think they do this reasonably well. some managers can get a bit fanatical about this, which can shoot them in the foot sometimes but that is not the case at any company i worked for.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#166I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
I think the folks discussing whether or not 10x developers exist are missing the more basic point here. In most companies, a manager's status is determined almost entirely by how many people he or she manages. It's absolutely in their best interest to hire more mediocre people than fewer exceptional people because the correct incentives haven't been put in place for managers in the company. At many places, the best t…
> In most companies, a manager's status is determined almost entirely by how many people he or she manages
That's interesting. Not the total compensation of the people she manages?
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#167I have held management and non-management careers in roughly equal proportion over my career. My list would look like this: 1) believing you can dramatically change the performance of an employee -- it's very rare to save someone and less experienced managers always believe they can. 1.5) corollary to the above: not realizing the team is aware and waiting for you to fix the problem and won't thank you for taking long…
6) believing your technical opinion matters -- I've seen way too many VP's making technical decisions that they are too far from the work to make, trust your team!
This! It needs management people who understand their role as being "facilitators", rather than being "decision makers". And they are kind of rare.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#168"It's not about technology"...and then racks up technical debt that has to continually be paid.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#169I think there is inverse proportionality of development speed vs code quality + maintainance cost which management does not take into a count, ever, no matter what.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#170Putting their own compensation and bonuses way above what decent people would do for employees. Their short-sightedness and selfish thinking does a lot of harm to thousands of people in every organization. Why am I calling these as mistakes and not just brushing these off as "it's a capitalistic system, just live with it"? I do so because good management that doesn't do all this keeps many more people happier than bad management. But this is the norm, and management that doesn't do this is a rare animal.
What's the point of making profits and more money if we can't increase happiness levels among more people, especially the ones who work on building the stuff that makes the money in the first place?
P.S.: My point is concise and can be counter argued in many ways. This is what I wanted to say without writing a whole book.